Example: UniProt Accession Lookup

Resolve a UniProtKB accession or entry name to a protein record — name, gene, organism, function, sequence, and the Atlas protein_hash — via the UniProt REST API (cached server-side).

Endpoint: GET /esm/protein/api/v1alpha1/uniprot/{uniprot_id}

Scope: UniProtKB accessions and entry names only (e.g. P24941, P53_HUMAN). Other accession namespaces (UniParc UPI…, MGnify MGYP…, IMG, PDB, Ensembl) are not supported and return 400.

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
uniprot_id	string (path)	UniProtKB accession or entry name (e.g. P24941, P53_HUMAN). The uniprotkb:-prefixed form is also accepted.

curl

curl "https://biohub.ai/esm/protein/api/v1alpha1/uniprot/P24941"

Python

import httpx

response = httpx.get("https://biohub.ai/esm/protein/api/v1alpha1/uniprot/P24941")
record = response.json()

print(record["protein_name"], record["organism"])
print("hash:", record["protein_hash"])

Response

{
  "accession": "P24941",
  "protein_name": "Cyclin-dependent kinase 2",
  "gene": "CDK2",
  "organism": "Homo sapiens",
  "function": "Serine/threonine-protein kinase involved in the control of the cell cycle...",
  "sequence": "MENFQKVEKIGEGTYGVVYKARNKLTGEVVALKKIRLDTETEGVPSTAIREISLLKELNHPNIVKLLDVIHTENKLYLVFEFLHQDLKKFMDASALTGIPLPLIKSYLFQLLQGLAFCHSHRVLHRDLKPQNLLINTEGAIKLADFGLARAFGVPVRTYTHEVVTLWYRAPEILLGCKYYSTAVDIWSLGCIFAEMVTRRALFPGDSEIDQLFRIFRTLGTPDEVVWPGVTSMPDYKPSFPKWARQDFSKVVPPLDEDGRSLLSQMLHYDPNKRISAKAALAHPFFQDVTKPVPHLRL",
  "protein_hash": "35b6d2d9f3fdbf93c112b7952fdb5d20",
  "sequence_length": 298
}

The protein_hash is the Atlas content-address key (md5(sequence.upper())). Use it to chain into the hash-keyed Atlas reads, e.g. GET /esm/protein/api/v1alpha1/proteins/{protein_hash}.

To run a similarity search starting from a UniProt ID, chain these two calls: GET /uniprot/{uniprot_id} to resolve the record, then pass the returned sequence to GET /similarity-search?sequence=. Similarity search is sequence-only — it does not accept a UniProt ID directly.

Malformed or non-UniProtKB ids return 400; a well-formed id with no UniProt entry returns 404; an upstream UniProt failure returns 502.